6 Portable Toilet Horror Stories

6 Portable Toilet Horror Stories

Love them or hate them portable toilets are a necessity at large events. With thousands of attendees, the facilities are often pushed beyond the max and and horror stories are more common than we’d like to think. We’ve compiled a list of such occasions:

Glastonbury Lake
Glastonbury flooded in 2013 when a torrential downpour for the first 2 days of the event resulted in some areas of the arena and designated camping areas being 3 ft deep in water. This caused thousands of people to be tent-less and caused a lot of delay in festival operations. More importantly, more than 50 chemical toilets sunk into the mire, polluting the flood waters with waste – human waste!

Calvin Harris’ Toilet Troubles
While performing at Bestival in 2010, Harris went into a backstage portable loo just minutes before he was due to go on stage. Madness frontman Suggs spotted the Scottish music producer and decided to break the lock so the door wouldn’t open. As a result, Calvin missed the start time of his set while security struggled to break the lock open.

A Colossal Truck-up
In 1998, again at Glastonbury, the Dance tent was flooded with 8 inches of muddy water, turning it into an unusable mudbath. Festival organisers had the clever idea of bringing in a toilet truck with storage tank to suck out the lake of mud. A great idea in theory, but unfortunately for the people in the tent there were two settings for the pump – suck and blow. You can imagine what happened next, and it wasn’t pretty.

Girl Gets her Head Stuck in Toilet
Back in 2009, this time at Leeds fest, a girl had to be rescued by a group of firemen after her head got stuck down a toilet for 2 hours. When her story subsequently went viral on the internet, people came up with various theories as to how and why her head became stuck in such an unpleasant place. In reality, she was simply trying to retrieve her handbag, along with train tickets, purse and mobile phone.

PTSD – Portable Toilet Stress Disorder
It’s something that happens too much at festivals and other large events – people tipping over portable toilets with someone in. While the people on the outside may see it as a joke, the unfortunate individuals who are unlucky enough to have this happen to them definitely do not. One man on popular festivals forum efestivals revealed that he had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and had to take weeks off work after fearing he was going to drown in waste.

Where am I?Stories about portable toilets being tipped over with someone inside are commonplace, but it is also surprisingly common how often portable toilets are relocated with someone inside. At the Newlyn Fish Festival in 2015 a woman was inadvertently carried from one side of the festival to the other, reappearing on the other side of a harbour! Luckily she was unharmed, just a bit shocked.